Noga Weiss, an 18-year-old former hostage, told N12 on Thursday that her terrorist captor had demanded her hand in marriage and insisted that she stay in Gaza to raise his children.

Weiss, who was released on her 50th day in captivity as part of a temporary ceasefire agreement, was kidnapped from Kibbutz Beeri on October 7.

After 14 days in captivity, her captor gave her a ring and demanded that she stay in Gaza to marry him and have his children.

“He told me, ‘Everyone will be released, but you will stay here with me and have my children,’” she recalled. “I pretended to laugh so he wouldn’t shoot me in the head.”

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.
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Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherfuckers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

ISTANBUL (AP) — A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.

The comments by Khalil al-Hayya in an interview Wednesday came amid a stalemate in months of talks for a cease-fire in Gaza. The suggestion that Hamas would disarm appeared to be a significant concession by the militant group officially committed to Israel’s destruction.

But it’s unlikely Israel would consider such a scenario. It has vowed to crush Hamas following the deadly Oct. 7 attacks that triggered the war, and its current leadership is adamantly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state on lands Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.

New video evidence uncovered by CNN significantly undermines two Pentagon investigations, the latest of which was released last week, into an ISIS-K suicide attack outside Kabul airport, during the American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.

The incident was a gruesome coda to America’s longest war, leaving dead 13 United States military service members and about 170 Afghans who were desperately seeking US help to flee the Taliban takeover of Kabul. For two years, the US military has insisted that the loss of life was caused by a single explosion, and that troops who reported coming under fire and returning it were likely confused in the chaotic aftermath, some suffering from the effects of blast concussion.

But video captured by a Marine’s GoPro camera that has not been seen publicly in full before shows there was far more gunfire than the Pentagon has ever admitted. A dozen US military personnel, who were on the scene and spoke to CNN anonymously for fear of reprisals, have described the gunfire in detail. One told CNN he heard the first large burst of shooting come from where US Marines were standing, near the blast site. “It wasn’t onesies and twosies,” the Marine said. “It was a mass volume of gunfire.”

An Afghan doctor who spoke to CNN on the record for the first time said he personally pulled bullets from the wounded, and with his hospital staff counted dozens of Afghans who died from gunshot wounds.

Combined, the new evidence challenges the credibility of the two US military investigations and raises serious questions for the Pentagon, which has continued to dismiss mounting evidence that civilians were shot dead.

The United Nations has decided to exclude the terrorist organization, Hamas, from its blacklist containing states and non-state actors which committed acts of sexual violence in 2023.

The UN claimed it excluded Hamas due to lack of credible evidence. The UN report also excluded Russia from the list, despite evidence of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers against women in Ukraine.

Israeli Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, said he was “disgusted” by the report. The UN blacklist and wider annual report, authored by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was debated Tuesday, the first day of Passover.

“Guterres has turned the UN into an extremely antisemitic and anti-Israel institution during his tenure, which will be remembered as the darkest in the organization's history,” Katz said, in a statement to the media.

Apple has pulled WhatsApp and Threads, two Meta-owned apps, from its app store in China under orders from Beijing's top tech regulator, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Why it matters: The move signals a new intensity in the U.S.'s conflict with China over access to key technologies and information, which has already resulted in a range of tariffs and exports controls on products such as computer chips and telecoms equipment.

The big picture: China has been tightening its "Great Firewall" to censor the internet since 2000, and many major American tech and media companies no longer operate in the country.

Apple also removed Signal and Telegram from the app store in China.

The intrigue: China's move comes as the U.S. Congress moved closer to a Saturday vote on a package of laws that includes a measure forcing Chinese-owned Bytedance to sell TikTok's U.S. operations.

Scientists say they have found new evidence that there is a hidden planet in our solar system.

For years, some astronomers have been suggesting that unusual behaviour on the edge of our solar system is best explained by another, undiscovered planet. That helps explain the orbits of objects that lie at the very far reaches of our solar system, more than 250 times away from the Sun than we are.

Now Konstantin Bogytin, an astronomer who helped popularise the theory, says that he and his team have found yet more evidence that suggests that planet exists. The new work represents “the strongest statistical evidence yet that Planet 9 is really out there”, he said.

In the new work, scientists looked at a set of trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, which is the technical term for those objects that sit out at the edge of the solar system, beyond Neptune

The Hamas terrorist group has reportedly changed its demands for a hostage and ceasefire deal.

Hamas's revised proposal comes with its own set of conditions. The group is seeking a higher number of Palestinian security prisoners to be released, including individuals with more serious charges.

Additionally, Hamas is calling for international guarantees to ensure Israel's compliance with the ceasefire agreement.